


Needle and the thread

by Builder



Series: Missing Moments [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Avengers (2012), Sickfic, Sort Of, Vomiting, post ca:tfa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-24 21:54:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12021789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Builder/pseuds/Builder
Summary: Steve drains his now-cold coffee and laces up his running shoes.  He rolls his neck to interrupt the stiffness with a sharp pop of effervescent bubbles, then picks up his keys and steps out the door to continue the beating of his feet against the sidewalk.  Because lord knows he won’t be sleeping tonight._______________________________________________________________________________________________________After Steve's out of the ice, there isn't much he can think about but what he's lost.





	Needle and the thread

**Author's Note:**

> Set between the end of CA: TFA and the Avengers. Pretty much canon.
> 
> This is actually quite dark and definitely falls into the hurt/no comfort category, so be warned. Also, nothing happens. No dialogue. No plot. It’s a really dark story about existing.
> 
> Very much the same tone as Who are the stars.
> 
> Trigger warnings: read the tags, but this fic is also really hard to tag. I guess be warned for the borderline-self harm thought process of a person in the midst of a PTSD/love lost combo scenario. Also warning for the vaguest description of not-sex.
> 
> Oh, and by the way, I'm on tumblr now! Visit me @Builder051. I have some fandom stuff and some original characters hanging out over there.

The punching bag gives too much under Steve’s taped knuckles.  He sends it swinging with every hit, his fists jamming into the fabric and forcing it to bend and flex against its padded inners.  The bag looks ready to split; the chain that suspends it clinks gently as it strains against the carabiner holding it to the ceiling.

 

Steve isn’t sure how long he’s been at it.  The dusky light coming in through the tiny windows at the top of the gym wall has long since faded to darkness.  He’s tired, quickly running out of available energy and feeling the burn of lactic acid in his muscles.  It’s uncomfortable, verging on the beginnings of pain.  But the searing in his forearms and shoulders is also amazing.  His brain is cataloguing the sensation as a little more gratifying than the hollow jab of fist against the punching bag’s thin skin of plastic.

 

Maybe he’d feel better if the thing would crumple and shatter beneath the force of his punches.  ThenSteve’d have a couple of busted knuckles and maybe a broken finger or two to keep him company rather than just the looming emptiness of his apartment.  A tongue of achy loneliness nips up from Steve’s stomach and settles in his chest.  It makes his rib cage feel tight and tender, and he struggles to think of anything but Bucky as he puts every ounce of bodyweight behind the next jab. 

 

If only he could feel the crunch of bone, his own or someone else’s, like Red Skull’s or Zola’s.  The punching bag splits.  Steve can feel the synthetic stuffing against the tape around his hand.  The softness is utterly distasteful.  He retracts a little and wipes the accumulated sweat from his forehead. Steve’s breath is coming in gulps, and euphoric discomfort is steadily throbbing through his upper body.

 

He leaves the bag as-is, mentally promising to drop some extra cash on next month’s membership in order to make up for it, and leaves through the front door.  The 24-hour fitness center is deserted at this hour, so no one sees Steve loose his fist on the façade of the foreclosed storefront next door.  The brick crumbles a little, but doesn’t give like the punching bag.  The smarting pain in the back of his hand comes as a relief.

 

The gym is a few miles from Steve’s apartment, and he can easily jog home in a matter of minutes.  He invents a meandering route, though.  Running aimlessly through the DC suburb seems preferable to heading back to his too-quiet residence that doesn’t yet feel like home. 

 

Sweat pours off Steve’s brow, but the frosty autumn breeze turns it to a dry chill almost immediately. Each strike of his sneaker-clad foot against the pavement brings a throb to his forehead and a sear to his quads to match the diminishing one in his shoulders.  It brings a sense of purpose, a sense that he’s actually doing something instead of perseverating on memories that should be gone forever. Even if __something__ happens to be trying his very best to wear down a body that’s now built not to be worn down.

 

Finally Steve comes to his neighborhood.  He circles the block a couple of times before finally pointing his feet in the direction of his building.  As he slows his crisp jog to a walk, exhaustion sweeps over him in a crushing wave.  The ache in his head surpasses building nausea and skips straight to vertigo that sends him leaning off the front steps to heave up a bleary surge of mucous and bile.  It seems that dehydration hit a long time ago.  He’s so dizzy that the shadowy grass starts to look like a deeply icy chasm, and the blood pounding in his ears resembles Bucky’s terrified heartbeat in the final moments that he clung to the edge of the train…

 

Steve dry retches a couple of times and lets his body dissolve into tremors from combined decades-old and minutes-old adrenaline.  He leans back against the building’s front door, feeling guilty as he begins to catch his breath.  He deserves to feel sick, to be in pain.  It’s all his fault.  Every last thing he feels is the result of a choice he’s made.  His fault he’s been awake and on edge for going-on 24 hours.  His fault his heart’s throbbing up at the base of his skull and bringing with it an awkward wooziness that feels familiar and alien all at once.  His fault that the train kept chugging down the track while he lost his grip on Bucky and everything that mattered…

 

The hall is dark and echoy, and Steve weaves a little as he makes his way to his apartment.  It’s sad that this is as close as he can get to being drunk in his enhanced state.  Instead of cushioning the pain like a glass of scotch used to be able to do—before it pushed him into the realm of incoherent sickness—the disconnect between Steve’s head and feet is just adding to the crushing sadness in his chest.

 

Once in the kitchen, Steve starts making coffee, more out of habit than anything else.  He still doesn’t feel well, and he doubts the hot bitter liquid will make any kind of positive difference.  He’d be better off with ginger ale and dry toast, but he feels that he somehow doesn’t deserve it.  He’d rather burn his tongue and let his blood sugar keep plummeting.

 

Steve vaguely thinks he should shower.  He’s sweaty, salt dried salt beginning to crust in a dusting on his skin.  It reminds him of being in the heat of battle, of times when he’s been fighting for something.  And really, he’s still fighting for something.  Only now it’s his own sanity rather than the good of the nation.  And that makes him feel guilty.

 

The first sip of coffee is astringent and sickening, but the warmth brings the lightest touch of comfort. The ghost of a memory surfaces, and Steve imagines himself sharing a canteen of something steaming and leaning as heavily into Bucky as he can with other soldiers all around.

 

Steve sets the mug down and collapses into one of the rickety kitchen chairs.  The reminiscence is all he has left to hold onto, but it’s almost too excruciating, more painful than the ache of muscle soreness in his shoulders and shattered tremble in his knees.  Steve’s head throbs; his throat feels tight and sharp.  He drops his elbows to his thighs and his forehead to his hands, trying not to feel the echo of the comforting hand he wishes would come down on the back of his neck. 

 

Bucky would tell him he’s thoroughly stupid.  Grab a fistful of the front of Steve’s shirt and drag him into the bedroom to get some rest.  Serve up something overly rich to eat and lift the fork to Steve’s lips himself if he tried to say he wasn’t hungry.  He’d insist Steve doesn’t deserve to suffer.  But Steve knows he does.

 

The memory of Bucky’s touch drifts up and across the side of Steve’s face.  The surge of pure longing that shoots from his head to his chest to his stomach and back up again is harder to take than any of the self-induced pains he’s experienced so far tonight.  He thinks perhaps it would be easier to die than sit there while his heart turns itself inside out.  But he sighs and relishes every second. 

 

Steve presses his fingertips into the line of his eyebrows.  The urge to throw up again competes with the urge to start bawling, and both sit there, battling it out, behind the lump of untouched emotion at the back of his throat.  Tremors of illness and exhaustion and anger slip from his arms to his legs.  He would be freezing were it not for the insistent, growing warmth tenting the front of his gym shorts. 

 

It’s too much to feel at the same time.  Steve slams one fist down on the table, making his coffee mug rattle and spill over the edges.  He can’t stand it.  He needs to calm down, but he’s afraid that if he does, he’ll never feel anything ever again.

 

The shower spray is lukewarm on Steve’s back as he braces against the wall with one hand and grips himself with the other.  His breathing is rough and shallow.  Dizziness threatens to drop him to the slick plastic floor, and colors flash on the back of his closed eyelids more quickly than he can take them in.  Pain is pleasure and pleasure is pain, and both are caught in a maelstrom he both can’t wait and can’t bring himself to escape. 

 

Steve’s breath hitches, and he carries water in his hands to splash the evidence from the tile wall.  His fingertips tingle slightly, and he imagines each droplet hitting his skin is the stab of a needle, dosing him with enough discomfort to get him back to normal.  But then the smarting spray begins to feel like the insistent presence of rogue snowflakes carried on the breeze.

 

Steve doesn’t bother to wash.  He turns off the water and towels himself semi-dry, then grabs his gym shorts from where he’d abandoned them on the bathroom floor.  His quads protest with soreness as Steve pulls them back on, and he gets a similar screech of aching from his triceps as he throws his t-shirt over his head.  But the pain is good.  This pain is good.

 

Back in the kitchen, Steve drains his now-cold coffee and laces up his running shoes.  He rolls his neck to interrupt the stiffness with a sharp pop of effervescent bubbles, then picks up his keys and steps out the door to continue the beating of his feet against the sidewalk.  Because lord knows he won’t be sleeping tonight.

**Author's Note:**

> Ok, I’m putting my inspiration at the end because I didn’t want it to be distracting from the actual story. It’s kind of funny, and the story, well, you know, it’s kind of not. 
> 
> So. My degree is in Communication & Journalism, and I have a scholarly interest in song lyrics and the messages behind them. My undergrad thesis was about Anaconda. No joke. 
> 
> A couple years ago, I got really fascinated with Shawn Mendes’s Stitches. I’m interested in deconstructing the lyrics and getting a deep meaning, although I’m not sure the song actually has one since it’s kind of a teenager song. But I keep thinking, what is this about? Someone whose lover is his reason for living? Someone who engages in risky behavior after losing a lover? I don’t know. But it could be deep if you think on it. 
> 
> I don’t generally use lyric websites to understand the words to songs unless they’re especially mumbly; I just listen to the song or watch the music video over and over again (old school). I’m not normally wrong about lyrics, so I was really surprised to find out that “beat it till I can’t breathe” is not actually a phrase in “Stitches.” 
> 
> Think about it. Bleed until I can’t breathe (actual lyric) makes no sense. Bleed until I…die of blood loss, more like. Beat it till I can’t breathe, on the other hand, well, there’s a wealth of meaning. Then all the meanings I can think of can coexist in a confused mind, torn apart by loss, looking for release, physically craving sensation. I feel like it sounds lame when I try to explain it, but can get really wrapped up in imagining the mindset of a person feeling that way.
> 
> So, truth is, I wrote this dark and introspective thing based on a misheard lyric from a ridiculously mainstream pop song. Yeah.


End file.
